


That he should make a knight-errant of himself

by laughingpineapple



Category: Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote - Jorge Luis Borges
Genre: Academia, Gen, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-01 13:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16765867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Prologue to an impossible task, twice over (with variants)





	That he should make a knight-errant of himself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mk_tortie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mk_tortie/gifts).



> _ I have said that the  _ visible _ product of Menard's pen is easily enumerated. Having examined his personal files with the greatest care, I have established that his body of work consists of the following pieces: _

  1. > _a) a symbolist sonnet that appeared twice (with variants) in the review_ La Conque _(in the numbers for March and October, 1899);_




  
  


The  _ Quixote _ may, as Pierre Menard once said, not be inevitable, but it is (among its many virtues) vivid and persistent. Long after my re-reading of certain beloved chapters, most frequently of the second part and now enriched by the perspectives I described in my earlier writing, I still found that it occupied the back of my mind, at once separate from my the figure of my departed friend and intrinsically conjoined. 

By his own admission, the task he had set to himself was spurred by two readings, as you will recall: a philosophical fragment and a crude pastiche. I do not doubt the veracity of his words, but, given the importance his experiment gained, in his thoughts and mine if nothing else, I have been led to wonder if there may have been more to it. A deeper origin, unknown perhaps even to his conscious thoughts. A certain quality of his person that would lend itself to the recursive dive he would embark into Cervantes’ work, which was not entirely unlike that of the the Hidalgo's himself with his chivalric romances. The meta-fictional awareness of the novel and the very condition of its protagonist do, after all, create a spiral of textual layers that leaves all of us standing at the edge of its abyss. Once a man has stared into it, embarking on any enterprise that carries an air of epic grandeur is akin to taking a step forward and joining its ranks. Pierre Menard plunged in head first.

So I went back to his bibliography, his collection of visible works, in search of a guide to the invisible.

I cannot say if the first item on the list already provides the answers I set out to find, but provide something it does, and it is worth a deeper examination.

In the month of March 1899, Pierre Menard published a symbolist sonnet which he titled  _ Il sipario nel bosco _ , “The Curtain through the Woods”. In October of the same year, he published it again, with variants. I had taken out both issues of  _ La Conque _ from my library and gone through them with great interest as I compiled the aforementioned list of my friend's works; the same, I am sure, did both the baroness de Bacourt and countess de Bagnoregio who were so generous as to endorse my findings. Nothing caught our eye beyond a pleasantly refined use of the Italian language, close to Petrarca's example. We weren't looking. At the same time, I have reason to believe that our collective oversight, which is simply unbelievable in the face of the intellectual stature of my kind friends, only proves Menard's point.

In the version dated March 1899, the poet uses the full extent of the sonnet's proposition to describe the lushness of dark and windswept woods. In the six remaining lines, he takes this image to represent the fragmentation that is inherent in every aspect of the human experience. There is no solid whole, no certain self, only an aimless scattering at each rising of a breeze. The curtain that dominates the title is not referenced nor alluded to in the text, predating, perhaps, certain Surrealist tendencies that would be in vogue today.

In the version dated October 1899, it is Menard himself who prefaces his work by writing that the text is “presented with variants”, an annotation which I duly transcribed in my list. The sonnet, however, is unchanged. I laid the pages side by side on my table, eager to find a word, a punctuation mark, some typographic quirk (as unbecoming as this last option would be) that would set one version aside from the other, but the text resisted my investigations. Not only was the composition identical in any way that matters - all the syntax, vocabulary and punctuation which I could have written at any time on yet another sheet of paper and call it a proper transcription of the work - but its incidental qualities remained likewise unchanged. The page number, 34, was the same through the two issues. The minimal foreword announcing the “variants” stood at the top of the page and was not long enough to cause the rest of the text to shift down. A printing mishap which took out most of an “a” in the first occurrence of  _ rami _ , “branches”, was repeated seven months later.

“The Curtain through the the Woods” is, by stated intent as well as in actuality, a symbolist poem. As such, it is steeped in dissonant dreams and visions: to strive for an Idea, for a glimpse of a greater truth, without ever broaching it directly is its blood, its very essence. How appropriate then, I remember telling myself as I first reread its verses, that it split in two. Two finite versions are all the reader can grasp of an abstract  _ Übertext _ , veiled (here is the titular curtain, maybe), unreachable, only ever fathomable by tracing two straight lines that begin with the two poems and considering their convergence.

Yet there is no point of convergence here, nothing more tangible, even by the measure of dreams, than the passing of seven months between the first print and the following.

Yet there is, by Menard's own confession: the sonnets  _ are _ variants.

Remembering the aforementioned oversight, a honest observer of these facts would have to concede that those seven months between the first printing in March 1899 and the second one in October of the same year, or the scarce few days that passed between my rediscovery of the first and second relevant issues of  _ La Conque _ during my recent cataloguing effort, are in fact difference enough. If the text did not change, the reader did, and the transformation was enough to discover the poem anew, making different sense of it. Therein, then, lies the scattering, the loss of certainty: that we can be so different as to look back and fail to recognize ourselves. The delta between the straight lines is temporal; the convergence, the sum of all the selves we brought to meet the poem.

That would suffice, and yet: I see them now, the two sonnets, standing like Scylla and Charybdis by the strait, revealed in their true nature. I shall never be a me again who will face them (it) and not remember that they are one and the same, and so the lines open, they are parallel, they coincide. What they contain is now an infinite. The woods welcome me, and I am lost.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this works as Borgesian worldbuilding, dear treatee? Tbqh I was more charmed by his second work as listed by the narrator, but hell if I could come up with anything resembling "a monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary from concepts at are neither synonyms nor periphrastic locutions for the concepts that inform common speech, but are, rather, ideal objects created by convention essentially for the needs of poetry". Symbolist sonnet it was, then! Happy Yuletide! (and fingers crossed this isn't too ambitious)  
> The title comes from the first pages of Don Quixote, naturally


End file.
